I came across something yesterday that might be good fodder for a debate...
Consider a simple login page. You submit the typical form with a userID and password. Your ActionForm performs a validation to be sure they filled in both fields and returns errors if any validation fails. Simple enough. You do the usual <html:errors/> to display the errors.
Now... Presumably most of us would now do the AUTHENTICATION from an Action (well, delegated of course), as opposed to doing it from the validate() method (I wouldn't view that as "correct" myself). Let's say the user is not authenticated (bad password perhaps)... So you forward to a "failure" forward, but what about displaying an error message to the user?
I imagine the typical thought is to put a message in a request attribute and do a <bean:write> to display it (with ignore="true" probably), or maybe more properly set some attribute of the form.
So, here's my point... We have in the JSP an <html:errors/> tag to display VALIDATION errors, but we also have a <bean:write/> to display the AUTHENTICATION errors. Is that optimal? Why can't we do it with one line (or can we? I don't mind learning something new!)
My thought is that maybe it would be appropriate to handle BOTH these situations by returning an ActionErrors collection. Ok, fine, we can insert it into request in the Action manually, but that's not a good idea because the attribute name might change down the road. High-coupling and all that jazz.
What to do? Well, the first question is, does anyone agree that it makes some sense to handle both situations with ActionErrors, and thereby only have a single line in the JSP to display both types of errors? If not, ignore the rest of this.
If you agree with that though, here's my suggestion... What if execute() in the Action returned an Object, and the object either implements an empty ActionForwardResult interface or an ActionErrorsResult interface (I just made those up of course), and that can be determined, the object casted and acted upon either as the usual ActionForward or the same way an ActionErrors is treated from validate() in the form.
What does everyone think? Am I making a big deal out of the arguably minor inelegance of two error display lines in the JSP, or is this possibly a real issue to deal with? Even if you don't view it as a problem, might this change result in a bit more flexibility that might be good, or would it be breaking some architectural rules (I'm a bit mixed on that last point frankly). Thanks all!
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
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